What in the heck is “hybrid picking” and why should you care? Hybrid picking is a technique that involves holding your pick as you normally would with your thumb and index finger, but also using your middle and ring fingers (and sometimes even your pinky) to attack the strings.

So what’s the payoff? There’s a different sound you can get from your fingers that you can’t get from a pick. The attack lets you get very sensitive, bluesy tones (think Robben Ford, Mark Knopfler, and Jeff Beck). Robben Ford tends to use a pick for rhythm and switches to bare fingers when he’s getting more aggressive, but playing at lower volumes. He moves to a different texture to highlight big changes in dynamic levels.

Also, when you’re using your fingers you’ll phrase differently because it is harder to play fast—it almost forces you to play more melodically. Check out Figs. 1 and 2. Play them first with your pick, and then try playing them with the hybrid technique.

For these examples, we are using the classical p–i–m–a system for right-hand notation, where m indicates your middle finger and a indicates your ring finger. All notes played with a pick will be marked with a downstroke symbol.

Hybrid picking is also great for playing arpeggios. Many times in slower songs the intro and verse have more arpeggiated sections and the choruses get big—you’ll need to strum and rock out a little more on those. After some practice, you’ll be able to hold your pick just like you always do and go back and forth between pick and hybrid techniques without thinking about it. It just becomes part of the fingerpicking process. In Figs. 3 and 4, you can see how we could apply this technique to a chord progression to not only create space, but also some interesting harmonies with ringing notes.

If you want to cop some of that straight-up chicken pickin’ madness on a Tele, hybrid picking is essential. Snapping the notes with your fingers is a big part of the sound—something that can’t be achieved with a pick. Figs. 5 and 6 are some double-stop chicken pickin’ licks that use the pick along with middle and ring fingers to snap the double-stops.

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